Virgin Trains

This article is about the former operator of the InterCity West Coast franchise. For other uses, see Virgin Trains (disambiguation).

Virgin Trains
Virgin Pendolino 390045 set heads from Glasgow to Euston in the Upper Clyde Valley
Overview
Franchise(s)
Main route(s)
Other route(s)
Fleet size56
Stations called at46
Stations operated15
Parent company
Reporting markVT
PredecessorInterCity
SuccessorAvanti West Coast

Virgin Trains (VT) (legal name West Coast Trains Limited)[1] was a train operating company in the United Kingdom owned by Virgin Rail Group, a joint venture between Virgin Group and Stagecoach, which operated the InterCity West Coast franchise from 9 March 1997 to 7 December 2019. The franchise covered long-distance passenger services on the West Coast Main Line between London, the West Midlands, North West England, North Wales and southern Scotland, consequently connecting six of the UK's largest cities: London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh, which have a combined metropolitan population of over 18 million. It had around 3,400 employees in 2015.[2]

The Virgin Trains brand was also used on the legally and operationally separate Virgin Trains East Coast from 2015 until 2018, and previously on Virgin CrossCountry, which operated between 1997 and 2007, as well as from 2018 to 2020 by Virgin Trains USA in Florida.

The contract expired on 7 December 2019 (having been originally scheduled for expiry in March 2020) and Virgin did not contest losing the franchise after its joint venture partner, Stagecoach, was disqualified due to an invalid bid in April 2019.[3]

  1. ^ Companies House extract company no 3007940 Archived 14 April 2014 at the Wayback Machine West Coast Trains Limited
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference Keystats was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ ."Branson: Virgin trains will vanish from UK after Stagecoach ban". The Guardian. 10 April 2019. Archived from the original on 18 December 2019. Retrieved 10 April 2019.